Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Sunday, September 29, 2013

On the
conservative side of the political spectrum, we frequently refer to liberals as
“low information voters”, a nice way of saying they are stupid. From their
point of view, however, we are the stupid ones. And not merely stupid, but
evil.

The divide
between conservatives and liberals can be seen in the outcomes of the many
polls and surveys that are announced on a daily basis. The numbers are depressingly
the same; ranging from 40-40% or 50-50%, depending on how many respond that
they don’t have an opinion. There is, moreover, what I call the “thirty percent
syndrome” of reliable liberal responses no matter what the issue may be. They
are the hard core.

There is,
however, a critical difference between stupidity and ignorance. All of us are
ignorant about something or many things. I surely am. I am in awe of people who
can make things or fix things. I appreciate it when someone demonstrates
expertise that informs me about a topic.

If you
Google “Americans + stupid” you will discover that the subject of whether
Americans are stupid generates a significant number of news items and articles.
For example, in late February, Reuters reported on a speech Secretary of State
John Kerry gave to students when he was visiting Berlin. While discussing
America’s virtues, such as tolerance of other points of view, he said, “The
reason is, that’s freedom, in America you have a right to be stupid.”

Kerry, who
I have always regarded as a dim bulb, inadvertently spoke a truth about the way
those currently in high office, the President, his Cabinet members, and staff
regard Americans. Those who oppose their policies and legislative agenda are
“stupid” and, if the President is to be taken at his word these days,
Republicans are “extremists” and other pejoratives. He is a master of the
propaganda technique of repeating a lie often enough until it becomes “truth.”

I find it
depressing to find that so many of our elected representatives display their
ignorance on a daily basis. It is depressing to know that officials appointed
to positions of great responsibility in our government see it only has an
opportunity to impose some ideology or agenda that is disconnected from science
or from any facts that support their machinations.

Let me say
that I have long regarded Barack Obama as stupid. His incompetence manifests
itself daily. He cannot speak without the assistance of a Tele-Prompter. He has
zero experience with the way people make a living or run a business. He has
zero experience regarding military affairs and appears to have no knowledge of
history. His lack of knowledge about economics has left the nation with the
highest debt and deficit in its history, and millions unemployed.

Obama is
currently campaigning to make the low information voters believe that
Republicans in Congress want to “shut down the government” and this is patently
untrue. Speaker of the House, John Boehner, now daily repeats that Republicans
in the House do not want to shut down the government, but are addressing whether
to defund Obamacare. There’s a difference, but Obama and his minions will
repeat and repeat and repeat the lie. In truth, most Republican leaders in
Congress know that defunding is a fool’s dream.

The single greatest example of
stupidity in America today is the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—a law that is
increasing unemployment, forcing others into part-time, unemployment, and
denying physicians the right to practice medicine while stripping patients of
their privacy, and will ultimately deny care to some judged ineligible due to
age or a previous condition.

On
September 17, Jonathan Jacobs, the director of the Institute for Criminal
Justice Ethics and chairman of the Department of Philosophy at John Jay College
of Criminal Justice, was published in The Wall Street Journal. “As Education Declines, So Does Civic Culture.”

Noting the
“laments from graduates” that emerge with student loan debt and “wondering if
their studies have prepared them for jobs and careers” Jacobs expressed the
opinion that “A less familiar but even more troubling problem is that their
education did not prepare them for responsible civic life.”

That is a
very nice way of saying that, by the time many reach college, they are poorly
prepared for that level of “higher” education and too often pick up a diploma
because colleges and universities these days are frequently just giant sausage
factories that exist to process students through while squeezing every dollar
out of them. The problem begins, however, in kindergarten with a thoroughly
dumbed-down educational system.

Jacobs
acknowledges this saying, “The trouble begins before college. Large numbers of
high school students have faced so few challenges and demands that they are
badly unprepared for college.”

“Even
after three or four years of undergraduate education, many students,” said
Jacobs, “still cannot recognize reasoning when they encounter it.”

Reasoning
is a cognitive function that employs facts and analysis. Much of what passes
for political discourse from the White House and Democratic politicians these days
is based on emotion no matter what the issue may be; whether it is gun control
or invading Syria.

Conservatives
are denigrated for actually pointing to the Constitution and suggesting that
what is being proposed is forbidden by it. If, however, the intended audience
has never read the Constitution and has a warped or inadequate understanding of
American history, that kind of demagoguery works.

“A great
many graduating students have little idea of what genuine intellectual
exploration involves,” said Jacobs. They have passed through all phases of the
educational system lacking the capacity to think through, not just the issues
of the day, but have failed to acquire the most basic skills. He noted that
employers frequently discover that “many college graduates can barely construct
a coherent paragraph and many have precious little knowledge of the world—the
natural world, the social world, the historical world, or the cultural world.”

These college graduates are often the
sons and daughters of a generation of college graduates who likewise were
regurgitated into the world with a comparable lack of knowledge and skills.

How many
times has Jay Leno gone onto the street to ask people questions about events
and personalities, only to demonstrate how abysmally ignorant they are? This
kind of street theatre is repeated all the time in YouTube videos. A recent one
asked people to sign a petition to have Karl Marx run for office!

“The cost
to America of failing to reverse the trend toward trivializing education will
be more than just economic,” said Jacobs. “It will be reflected in social
friction, coarsened politics, failed and foolish policies, and a steady decline
in the concern to do anything to reverse the rot.”

The late
comedian, George Carlin, once said, “Never underestimate the power of stupid
people in large groups.” I thought of that when I heard that Barack Obama had
been reelected.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

I have
been trying to remember when there was so much anger between the Democrats and
Republicans. Or maybe I should say between liberals and conservatives? Or maybe
I should say between the Tea Party and the Republican Party? Or maybe I should
say those who find the President of the United States a contemptible liar who
has diminished a once great superpower to an object of disrespect?

There is
plenty of anger to go around. The mood of the nation is one of anger from one
end of the political spectrum to the other.

What is
one to make of a White House senior advisor, Dan Pfeiffer, who compared
Republicans to arsonists, hostage-takers, and suicide bombers? The Majority
Leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, told Republicans that “There’s no need for
conversations” telling them to send over a continuing resolution without
defunding Obamacare. He has called Tea Party members of the House “anarchists.”

Meanwhile,
Republicans who do not want to see the government shut down are labeled “RINOs”
(Republicans in Name Only). Instead of keeping the spotlight on the Democrats
who foisted Obamacare on us, we have been watching the Republican Party tear
itself apart.

As the
Wall Street Journal columnist, Kimberly Strassel put it, “The
tragic reality is that this vote isn't shaping up to be all that perilous for
the owners of the law. Nobody is even talking about Democrats. Nobody has put
an iota of pressure on them for months. Every camera, every microphone has been
trained on the GOP.”

Her colleague, Daniel Henniger, described the
fratricide arising from the dispute over defunding Obamacare, saying, “This
effort has not, for some time now, been about victory. It has become as
RedState’s Erick Erickson put it with his usual eloquences, about shining a
light on the ‘cockroaches’ in the GOP. Ted Cruz has spent months berating his
own side as ‘appeasers’ who care only about ‘being invited to all the right
cocktail parties in town.”

The result has been a GOP in meltdown while
the President happily joined in on Friday calling the Tea Party members in
Congress—though not by name-- “extremists.”

All this has brought to mind Barry
Goldwater’s declaration to the Republican Party when he accepted their
nomination to run for President in 1964. “Let me remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no
vice. And moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” He lost by a
landslide to the incumbent, President Lyndon B. Johnson.

I understood what Goldwater meant, but
extremism has never played well in American politics. Indeed, the Constitution
is constructed so that any form of extremism can be thwarted by the checks and
balances that slow any rush toward ill-considered legislation. That, however,
did not work when the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and imposed
Obamacare on everyone.

Those who believe that, even with a
Republican majority after the 2014 midterm elections, President Obama would not
veto a bill to repeal Obamacare are deluding themselves.

Hating Obama is not
enough. Understanding how our republic works is essential.

Tea Party came about initially as a
protest against Obamacare and then grew has a grassroots political movement
that elected a number of those it supported to the House. It is this bloc of
votes that Speaker John Boehner has struggled to work with. In the Senate, Tea
Party members include Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Tom Coburn, Marco Rubio, and Pat
Toomey.

Obama has many faults, but he has proven
himself a master manipulator. The current struggle over Obamacare has played
into his hands. That is unfortunate because what the GOP must do between now
and the 2014 midterm elections is to focus on defeating those Democrats up for
election who have supported Obama.

The general anger against Obamacare will gain
in momentum, but if the GOP is seen as a bunch of crazies, it will affect the
outcome. That’s the way it played out in 1964.

At this writing the possibility of a
government shutdown is fifty-fifty. It will be over quickly, but by then the
GOP will have dealt itself a disservice.

Until the GOP secures control of the Senate,
the House, and the White House Obamacare will remain the law of the land. That
is very bad news for all Americans and the future of America. Meanwhile, it is
a good idea to remember that many bad laws have been reversed and repealed.

Friday, September 27, 2013

The
release today of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control’s Fifth
Assessment reveals how the IPCC has been wrong on every prediction and claim it
has made over the years in which it has waged a war on the use of the primary
sources of energy on which the entire world depends, coal, oil and natural gas.

It is an insidious war on the development of better living standards and on
economic growth at home and around the world.

A
combination of environmental and political entities has joined together to
advance the bogus claims of “global warming” since its establishment in 1988 by
the United Nations.

The new Fifth “Assessment”, based as always on flawed and false
computer models, is another attempt to deceive people into believing that the
world is at risk from rising temperatures, but the reality is that for at least
sixteen years, the Earth has been in a cooling cycle and is likely to continue
to cool for decades to come.

Claims
that “global warming” is responsible for major weather events are baseless when
one understands that, during the time the IPCC has been in existence, the Earth
has had a record low in the number of tornadoes, the number of hurricanes, and
no change in the rate of sea level rise, despite its claims to the contrary.
Moreover, there have been record gains in the amount of Arctic and Antarctic
ice.

The
“science” the IPCC cites is without merit and it does not take a degree in
meteorology to understand that it is the amount of solar radiation that
determines the Earth’s overall temperature and that the Sun has been
experiencing a natural, cyclical decrease as the result of less sunspot
activity. Moreover, the other primary factor is the amount of water vapor, not
carbon dioxide, in the Earth’s atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a minimal element
of the atmosphere and plays no role in either heating or cooling.

It is time
to end the propagandistic and nefarious activities of the IPCC and end the
greatest hoax of the modern era.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

I
frequently marvel that a loon like Nancy Pelosi could have become Speaker of
the House and is currently the House minority leader. Recently she said, “The
cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make. It’s really important that
people understand that. We cannot have cuts just for the sake of cuts.”

This is
dishonesty on a galactic scale. It also provides an insight into why, short of
the mandatory sequestration that went into effect last year when Congress could
not come to any agreement on any cuts, the government continues to spend money
in ways that are just short of criminal.

In July, a
Rasmussen poll determined that 62% of likely voters thought the government
should cut spending in response to the nation’s economic problems. That
percentage was actually down from the previous month’s 65% and was the lowest
support for reduced spending since August 2012.

That same
month, a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll revealed that 83% of Americans
disapproved of the job performance of Congress. Approval of President Obama’s
job performance was closely divided between 45% approval and 50% disapproval.

There are
any number of think tanks and citizen’s organizations that keep tabs on
government spending, but their periodic reports and news release seem to have
no impact whatever. That’s something that members of Congress and others inside
the Beltway know.

At a time
when Republicans and Democrats will lock horns over raising the debt ceiling
and the President thinks that any effort to defund the Affordable Care Act is
the result of the Republicans “messing with me” and not a reflection of how
widely disliked Obamacare is, it is instructive to look at just a few of the
ways public funding is being regularly and routinely squandered in ways that
are obscene.

As just
one small example, one good way to save taxpayer dollars would be to shut down
the National Science Foundation (NSF). It is spending $5.7 million on a project
to develop card games, videos and other “educational” programs “to engage adult
learners and inform public understanding and response to climate change.” The
Climate Change Educational Partnership (CCEP) was established by Congress in
2009 and, to date, it has already spent $46 million on the “threat” of
something that doesn’t even exist, global warming.

One of the
NSF’s grants went to a study of what motivates workers, love or money? It cost
$179,784. Another NSF grant, $2.25 on Tasmanian Devil facial tumors. This is an
animal native to an island off the coast of Australia nowhere else. Part of
another a half-million dollar grant was used to develop a video game the
stimulated a high school prom. The NSF funded $350,000 to Purdue University to
study how golfers could improve their game.

The NSF
may take top honors for insanely wasteful programs and projects, but there is
hardly a single department of the government that does not do the same thing.
All that whining and wailing about sequestration was really about having fewer
dollars to waste and fewer people with which to waste it.

For
example, the Transportation Security Administration lets 5,700 pieces of unused
security equipment sit in storage in a Dallas, Texas warehouse. Worth $184
million, it costs the TSA $3.5 million annually to lease the space.

As
Obamacare expands the role of the Internal Revenue Service and we learn how
some of its administrators targeted, denying or delaying, a common tax-exempt
status to conservative groups routinely granted to all manner of other kinds of
organizations, let us not forget the $4.1 million the IRS spent in 2010 on a
lavish conference for employees.

The
Department of Agriculture awarded a $149,000 grant to researchers at Fairleigh
Dickinson University in New Jersey to study how to eliminate the “freshman 15”
extra weight that these students pack on when they can eat anything and as much
as they want.

Morocco
must have one heck of a good lobbyist because the Labor Department spent $1
million there to improve “gender equality” in the workforce there. The State
Department spent $450,000 to develop “green jobs.”

Dave
Ramsey, who advises people on radio, TV and in print on how to manage their
personal finances, has said, “The fact is that government can get out of debt
the same way you get out of debt. You quit borrowing money. You quit spending.
You balance the budget. But to do all of that, you’ll need to make some
sacrifices.”

The only
reason sequestration went into effect was because a blue-ribbon panel of
members of Congress could not agree to
any reductions in spending.

Now we
must endure a few weeks of meaningless political haggling to increase the debt
ceiling while the government continues its orgy of senseless spending on
projects and programs like those noted above.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Back in
May, in a commentary titled “Ted Cruz for President”, I took note of the
reasons why he would be eligible to run for President in 2016, citing the
opinions of legal scholars and others. The odds have just gone up that he will
not only make a run for the office, but can win. He will have to do it, at this
point, by overcoming the opposition of the elites in the Republican Party who
have managed to lose the last two elections for that office.

I
wrote, “As Solicitor General (for Texas), Cruz authored more than 80 U.S.
Supreme Court briefs and argued before it 43 times, securing a number of
landmark national victories defending U.S. sovereignty against the U.N. and the
World Court, the Second Amendment, the constitutionality of the Texas Ten
Commandments monument, the words ‘under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, and other
key decisions.”

In
the early years of the American government, what was high on the list of
priorities for the job of President was leadership. From Washington to Grant to
Eisenhower, Americans voted for men who had demonstrated that quality in
combat. They saw it in Ronald Reagan and they saw it in George W. Bush’s
response to 9/11 and stuck with him when he took us to war in Iraq.

Ted
Cruz, a freshman Senator, demonstrated that with extraordinary endurance as he
gave voice to the many reasons the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—is an attack on
the lives and the livelihood of all Americans.

He
has been attacked by the Republican establishment and even by some in the media
you might consider friendly to his crusade in order to get Americans to
understand how deleterious Obamacare is to our nation’s economy, to the free
market—free enterprise system, to the relationship we take for granted with our
personal physicians, and to the right to privacy that lies very much at the
heart of our healthcare and political system.

I
am not a legal scholar, but is obvious to me from my reading in American history
that the Founders never envisioned that the Constitution would be misconstrued
to say that the government has the right to tell us what we MUST PURCHASE and
that, of course is what Obamacare does. When you take away the fundamental
right to purchase or NOT purchase under penalty of a fine, you take away a
fundamental freedom, you take away liberty.

Ted
Cruz understands that and it is a wonder to me that everyone else does not
understand it as well. It is true that the House of Representatives, controlled
by the Republican Party, has passed a multitude of laws to repeal Obamacare. The
most recent law would defund Obamacare while funding the government.

Because
the Senate is controlled by Democrats, however, those laws die there. Indeed,
the former greatest deliberative body in the world does not deliberate much
anymore. It takes its marching offers from an offensive clique of men led by
Harry Reid (D-NV). The widespread public rejection of Obamacare has a number of
Democratic Party Senators, up for election soon, breaking with the Party to vote
with Republicans on some bills.

Ted
Cruz has given them a lesson in true leadership and in true courage.

A
new generation of Americans is being required to learn the lessons of those
first Americans who distrusted the tendency of power to become tyranny. In a
book by Timothy Sandefur that will be published in January by the Cato
Institute, “The Conscience of the Constitution: The Declaration of Independence
and the Right to Liberty”, he writes that “A government that enables a single
tyrant or a powerful group of influential insiders to exploit power to benefit
themselves would expose citizens to the same dangers of violence and oppression
that would exist in a country ruled only by warlords and strongmen.”

We
have been witnessing the tyrannical misuse of power by President Barack Obama
through the instrument of Executive Orders, through the revision of the
provisions of Obamacare that bypass the role of Congress, and, it can be
argued, by the party-line vote that passed—unread—a 2,700 page act that has
since ballooned to 27,000 pages of regulation, strangling and destroying one
sixth of the nation’s economy, healthcare, as it destroys jobs and business growth in other sectors.

The
reason the Tea Party movement came into being was a protest against Obamacare
before it was enacted and resistance to it since. It is the Tea Party movement,
as seen in those elected to office in the Senate and the House in 2010 that has
been leading the fight to defund and repeal Obamacare.

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

I don’t
know who looked more pathetic when President Obama addressed the United Nations
Assembly on Tuesday; him or the assembled ambassadors, many from nations where
human rights, justice, and liberty don’t exist. Like the League of Nations
before it, the United Nations has long since demonstrated how useless it is.

Founded in
1945, by 2003 just before the U.S. received the UN blessing to invade Iraq
there had been 291 wars resulting in 22 million deaths at that point. We would
stay in Iraq until 2011.

Since
2003, there have been conflicts in the Central African Republic, Yemen, an
insurgency in South Thailand, a civil war in Chad from 2005 to 2010, a conflict
between the Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas, a war in Somalia from
2006-2009, and in 2008 Russia invaded Georgia, seizing part of its territory.
In 2010-11 there was an Ivorian civil war. Et cetera!

In the
years since 2003, the largest war of all has been the effort to eradicate the
global Islamic jihad.

The U.S.,
while not engaged militarily, has been in a technical state of war with Iran
since our diplomats were seized in 1979 and there has been no formal resolution
to the war between North and South Korea, only a ceasefire. The Israelis have
fought several wars since its founding in 1948 and remains in a state of war
with Gaza; territory it ceded to the Palestinians in a fruitless quest called
“land for peace.”

Listening
to the President request that the UN Security Council pass a resolution
threatening “consequences” against the Syrian regime if it does not give up its
chemical weapons, I was struck by how weak the once greatest superpower,
America, has become. To his credit, Obama said, “If we cannot agree even on
this, then it will show that the United Nations is incapable of enforcing the
most basic international laws.”

True. But
the UN has a long history of not enforcing its own Charter or its Declaration
of Human Rights.

As 2013
began, fifty UN member states had yet to have paid their dues for its 2012
budget. The United States, the largest contributor, had been assessed $568
million. Nine nations contribute about 70% of the budget. They include Japan,
Germany, United Kingdom, France, Italy, Canada, Spain, and China.

There is
nothing the UN does that cannot be done by individual and independent
international organizations. In so many ways, the UN either does not solve
problems or is an integral part of them. For example the UN has maintained the
UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), created in 1949 exclusively for Palestinian
refugees. Several generations later, the support it provides does not take into
account the refusal of the Palestinians to cease from demanding the destruction
of the Israeli state.

When not
ignoring various conflicts, the UN keeps busy creating various treaties whose
purpose is to centralize power in the UN. It is hard to say which one is the
worst, but the Convention of the Seas deserves to be high on the list as an
attack on national sovereignty. There’s a treaty that would take away
everyone’s guns—like that’s going to happen—and one intended to get people to
stop smoking.

The UN has
been a congenial gathering place for many of the world’s dictators and some of
their nations have served on its Human Rights Council, turning it into a
complete mockery of human rights. Its Middle East clique of nations wants to
make it an international crime to say anything critical about Islam.

I would be
remiss if I did not mention that the greatest hoax of the modern era, global
warming, was directed from the UN via its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. One cannot even begin to calculate the billions wasted since the 1980s,
nor the man-hours of serious scientific research that was diverted to it since
then.

In
addition to the President’s devotion to the lies about “climate change”,
Obama’s address to the General Assembly only demonstrated how delusional about
international affairs he has been before and since assuming office in 2009.

“Together we’ve also worked to end a decade of war. Five
years ago nearly 180,000 Americans were serving in harm’s way, and the war in
Iraq was the dominant issue in our relationship with the rest of the world,”
Obama said. “Today, all of our troops have left Iraq. Next year, an
international coalition will end its war in Afghanistan, having achieved its
mission of dismantling the core of Al Qaida that attacked us on 9/11.” Both
nations are in the process of imploding.

Given the past week’s events in Nairobi, Kenya, the
church bombing in Pakistan, and the continuing attacks on U.S. military personnel
in Afghanistan, does anyone believe that the mission of dismantling the core of
al Qaeda has been achieved?

This is, after all, a President who could only manage to
get France to support his original intention to bomb Syria by way of achieving
regime change. None of our traditional allies expressed any support and the UN
remains stranded on the sidelines.

No one wants to follow the Commander-in-Chief into battle
and with good reason. He has a record of retreating from combat. He still wants
to close Guantanamo.

“We’re no longer in a Cold War”, he told the delegates,
but what we have learned over the past five years is that, just because he
believes his own delusions, that doesn’t mean they’re reflect reality. We are
in Cold War 2.0 with Russia even if he doesn’t think so. Putin went out of his
way to mock him. Prospects for any successful negotiations with Iran don’t
exist, but don’t tell Obama that.

Thanks to his speech writers, Obama always manages to say
the “right things.” What we know, however, is that while he can talk-the-talk,
he cannot walk-the-walk.

What we know about the United Nations is that it
should be told to leave the U.S. and its headquarters turned into condominiums.
We are surely not getting any value for the money we have pumped into the UN.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Obamacare—the
Affordable Care Act—will not be defunded and the government will not be shut
down.

Obamacare
is a putrefying beached whale, even if it is “the law of the land” as the
Democrats keep telling us. Well, Prohibition was once the law of the land until
it was repealed. Slavery, too, was the law of the land at one time. Even the
Supreme Court said so.

The vast
majority of Americans already hate Obamacare and not a day goes by that it does
not demonstrate that it is unaffordable, unworkable, and a cancerous law that
kills jobs. Eventually it will kill people.

Obamacare,
passed without a single Republican vote, will become a Democratic Party poison
pill. It was passed when the party controlled both houses of Congress and, by
the following midterm election in 2010, the Democrats lost the House.

If the
Republicans can manage to avoid doing something really stupid, the 2014
midterms will give them control of both houses. For now, though, the efforts of
Sen. Ted Cruz and others are misguided and mistaken.

We are
watching the Congress of the United States engage in a political charade. The
House has sent the Senate a continuing resolution to fund the operation of the
government for a few months. The Senate will strip out the defunding element.
In the end, “in the best interest of the nation”, they will agree to raise the
debt ceiling and agree on some minor spending cuts.

No one
wants to shut down the government more the Barack Obama. He and the Democrats
would use that to hammer the Republicans in 2014.

If you
think all this is bizarre, can you imagine what people in other nations must
think?

The nation
has a debt that is larger than its gross domestic product, the sum total of
everything we sell to each other and the world. The deficit, the different
between what the government takes in and what it spends is another problem.
Obama managed to double the debt during his first term. He should be called the
Terminator.

Since the
2008 financial crisis, two things are known. The huge, multibillion dollar
bailout of the banks and investment houses worked. They were part of the crisis
when they lent mortgage money to people who could not repay it because two
government entities, Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, told them to do that, making
the critical second element of the crisis. For reasons that defy understanding,
both entities are still in business. They should have been shut down;
particularly in light of the billions the government had to pump into them to
avoid massive defaults.

General
Motors was on the way to the bankruptcy court and was bailed out as well, but
its creditors were screwed while its union ended up part owners. The second
known thing is that Obama’s multi-billion dollar “stimulus” did not work. There
were no “shovel ready jobs.” Now there are even fewer jobs.

Then there
is the Federal Reserve, an independent part of the international banking
cartel, but granted the right to print money, has been doing so to the tune of
$85 billion a month in order to buy U.S. debt issues. At the same time it has
kept interest rates at near zero, thus providing the banks with free money. It
is a shell game with everyone pretending they do not know what either the left
or right hand is doing. It is bound to implode at some point.

To
understand the gravity of the situation, by January of this year the Federal
Reserve revealed that its holdings of U.S. government debt had increased to an
all-time record of $1,696,691,000,000. Its holdings had increased 257% since
Obama first took office in 2009. In the months since then it has, of course,
increased.

To put it
another way, we are Greece. Or Spain or any of the old world nations that
embraced the dream of a socialist paradise providing cradle to grave support.
The European Union was saved only because their central banks moved money
around to prevent it and “austerity” programs were enacted.

The
America in which I was born in the 1930s was struggling to come out of the
Great Depression. America today is in the midst of a comparable economic
disaster. For example, households on food stamps now outnumber all households
in northeast America. A record 23,116,928 American households were enrolled
during the month of June.

Unemployment
is another Obama disaster. In the four and a half years he has been President,
millions have given up looking for work, wages are stagnating, and America is
becoming a nation of part-time workers.

The last
“fiscal cliff” agreement resulted in a payroll tax increase from 4.2% to 6.2%
siphoning off earnings from workers to the ever-expanding government. In 2012,
the last full year of Obama’s first term, median household income was $51,017.
That has since dropped to $51,100, a loss of 4.89% from 2008 to 2012. Less
money circulating in the marketplace has stagnant economy written all of it.

As
Obamacare goes into effect on October 1st America will become a nation in which
everyone’s health records and privacy will end. There will be fewer physicians,
fewer hospitals and clinics, and there will be skyrocketing health insurance
premiums. We have Medicare and Medicaid. We don’t need, nor ever needed,
Obamacare.

Given the
events of recent weeks, it is understandable if people living in other nations
begin to think that the United States is no longer a dependable ally, financial
model or is giving any indication of functioning in a rational fashion.

As the
stink from Obamacare’s rotting carcass continues to rise it will be clear to
everyone that America’s credit, America’s credibility, and America’s future is
circling the drain. Be patient. It will be repealed.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

I will
never understand the kind of thinking behind a lie so big that it became an
international fraud and swindle. I cannot understand why an international
organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) operating
under the umbrella of the United Nations, was permitted to issue reports of an
imminent threat to the Earth, to mankind, that a freshman student of
meteorology would know were false.

At long
last the Big Lie of Global Warming has been totally exposed and we can thank
The Heartland Institute, a free market think tank that has organized and hosted
eight international Conferences on Climate Change since 2008 to expose the lies
behind global warming—now called “climate change”—as it became clear that
seventeen years of continuous cooling has put a Big Chill on this Big Lie.

I suspect
that the Heartland team, led by Joe Bast and including some remarkable,
dedicated people, will only get a line or two in some future historian’s
account of the deception that began in 1988 before a congressional committee.
Thereafter the global warming hoax was given momentum by former Vice President
Al Gore who, along with the IPCC, would receive a Nobel Peace Prize!

It helps
to have a sense of humor when you are doing battle with hucksters who have the
entire world’s media to defend them. The climate “skeptics”—some of the world’s
most renowned meteorologists—dubbed their effort the Nongovernmental
International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and, working with the Heartland
Institute, have just released a new edition of “Climate Change Reconsidered II.”

It arrives
just as the IPCC will release its 5th Assessment Report. The IPCC’s
lies will get lots of news coverage. Heartland's NIPCC report was fortunate to have
notice taken by Fox News, but beyond that most of the intransigent U.S. news
media ignored it.

As often
as not one has to look to foreign newspapers to get the truth. In Great
Britain’s The Mail, the headline on September 14 was “Global warming just HALF
what we said: World’s top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of
greenhouse gases wrong.” A leaked copy of the IPCC report revealed “scientific
forecasts of imminent doom were drastically wrong.”

Well, of
course, they were wrong. The so-called “science” on which they were based was
idiotic. It focused primarily on carbon dioxide (CO2) and other so-called
“greenhouse gases”, claiming they were trapping heat while being produced by
all manner of human activity related to generating energy with coal, oil, and
natural gas.

Dr. Martin
Hertzberg, Ph,D, co-author of “Slaying the Sky Dragon—Death of the Greenhouse
Gas Theory”, summed it up neatly, pointing out that water vapor in the Earth’s
atmosphere is a primary factor affecting climate long term and weather short
term.

“The
determinant of weather is mainly water in all its forms,” said Dr. Herzberg,
“as vapor in the atmosphere, in its heat transport by evaporation and
condensation, as the enormous circulating mass of liquid ocean whose heat capacity
and mass/energy transport dominate the motions of our atmosphere and the
precipitation from it, and finally as cloud, snow, and ice cover which
influence the radiative balance between the Sun, the Earth, and free Space.”As you try to wrap your mind around that
explanation, just think about the way the Earth goes through regular seasons as
well as predictable cycles of warming and cooling. It has done this
now for some 4.5 billion years.

To read "Climate Change Reconsidered II", visit its website. Among
its findings, the report notes that “no close correlation exists between
temperature variation over the past 150 years and human related CO2 emissions.”
Blaming the climate or even the weather on humans is insane. You might as well
blame the floods in Colorado on humans instead of the downpours of rain,
comparable to 1894 and 1969.

Indeed,
the U.S. gives ample evidence of greatly reduced events associated with the
weather. There have been fewer tornadoes over recent decades.It’s been eight years since a Category 3
hurricane hit the U.S. Droughts have been shorter and less extreme than the
1930s and 1950s. And sea levels are predicted to increase barely four to eight
inches per century and that may be on
the high side. There will be dramatic weather events, but there have always been dramatic weather events!

The
Heartland’s new report is welcome, but both they and I know that the same
deceitful charlatans are still at work in the United Nations, in the United States,
and around the world to keep this greatest of hoaxes alive.

The harm
the global warming hoax has done and continues to do is best seen in the
efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to wipe out the coal industry
based entirely on the lie that CO2 is a “pollutant.” When the House Energy
& Commerce Committee held a hearing on the Obama administration’s climate
policies thirteen agencies were invited to testify, but the administration
provided only EPA administrator Gina McCarty and Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz.
The latter read a prepared statement that was one long lie about global warming.
Presumably he was under oath!

Ms.
McCarty, the latest in a long line of environmental fanatics to run the agency,
was forced under questioning to admit that current and proposed greenhouse gas
regulations are not there to protect
the public but to influence “the international community” to reduce their CO2
and other alleged emissions. Not only do the regulations have no basis in
science, but they exist to keep the environmental war on energy use going and
to pressure developing nations such as China and India. Within the past month,
the citizens of Australia rose up and threw out the politicians who imposed a
“carbon” tax on them. The new prime minister has shut down the “climate
ministry” that existed to enforce it.

And while
most of the world wasn’t watching, the United Nations was seeking to impose,
once again, an international agreement similar to the failed and defunct Kyoto
Protocol to limit CO2 and other greenhouse emissions, based on the BIG LIE! The
44th Pacific Islands Forum, held in the Marshall Islands, was intent
on “an ambitious future climate regime to be finalized in 2015.”

That is
what must be understood. These people will not give up until they have no other
option. They will continue to exploit the ignorance of people regarding the
actual science, penalizing them by driving up the cost of energy use, by
closing down energy industries, prospective projects, and the jobs they
provide,

They
sustain the malignant ethanol scam that is ruining engines as this is being
written. They are behind the useless solar panel and wind turbine industries
that produce so little actual electricity they are a negative drag on the
national grid. You, however, are picking up the tab for their mandated use.
They practice a form of child abuse to tell children the Earth is doomed if
their mother uses a plastic bag to bring groceries home from the supermarket.

The
world’s BIGGEST LIE has been exposed and it will have to be exposed again and
again until a stake is driven into the evil heart of the “global warming” hoax.

Friday, September 20, 2013

Thursday, September 19, 2013

America is
filled with groups of people clamoring for their “rights” or claiming they are
being discriminated against. One group, however, has been successfully silenced
and, broadly speaking, turned into criminals. They are people who enjoy a
cigarette, a cigar, or a pipe. There is no one left to speak for them, so I
will.

A bit of
background; my Father smoked a pipe as long as I knew him and, before him, his
father smoked cigarettes. Both died well into their 90s. My Mother did not smoke
but in the lingo of the attack on smokers, she presumably was a “victim” of
secondary-smoke. She died at age 98. I have smoked since my days in college,
some six decades. I became a cigar smoker while in the army and have thoroughly
enjoyed them ever since.

In 2010 I
received a book by Michael J. McFadden titled “Dissecting Antismoker’s Brains”,
a privately-published examination of the movement to ban smoking. He wrote at
the time “If by some chance they eventually succeeded in eliminating smoking
from the face of the earth there would be virtually no time lapse before they
sank their fangs into Big Auto, Big Meat, Big Soda, or whatever supposedly
idealistic cause was out there that would promise them Big Money and Big
Power.”

He was
prescient because we have all witnessed campaigns against meat and soda
consumption, all replete with “scientific studies” which, on close examination
are bogus. We have been through three decades of such studies regarding the
end-of-the-world claims regarding “global warming” only to learn in 2009 that
they represented a cabal of scientists in America and Great Britain who
colluded to produce the International Panel on Climate Change reports, based on
falsified “science” and manipulated, bogus computer models.

These days
the IPCC’s latest assessment reluctantly admits that its claims have failed,
given a cooling cycle that began around 1998. Instead of shutting down and
disbanding, the IPCC continues its quest to control the use of energy sources,
oil, coal, and natural gas, denying it as much as possible to nations and
people who depend on them.

McFadden has
expanded on his earlier book with a new one, “TobakkoNacht: The Antismoking
Endgame.” (Aethna Press, $27.95, softcover) The title is a play on
Kristallnach, a 1938 event in Nazi Germany that revealed the depths of that
regime’s hatred of Jews, leading eventually to the Holocaust. Smokers are not
being rounded up and killed, but they are subjected to bans and meritless
increases in the cost of smoking; taxes that greatly benefit the states
imposing them while using the power of taxation to denigrate smokers.

McFadden,
who has a strong knowledge of statistics, examines how they have been used,
often falsely, to impose the agenda of the antismoking forces. “Statistics have
a real and valid use in science and public health,” he says, “but when it comes
to using social engineering techniques toward the end goal of creating a
smoke-free world, they have been destructively abused to create fear and
resentment far more than they have been constructively used to share
information and enlightenment.”

“TobakkoNacht”
is filled with information and enlightenment; the kind that the antismoking
campaigners do not want the public to know. It is just over 500 pages long and,
as McFadden warns, “A democratic republic that allows its policies to be built
on the basis of lies, and a citizenry that accepts those lies as being the
norm, is a republic and citizenry in very deep and serious trouble.” It’s not
just lies about smoking, global warming, or what we should eat and drink. It is
the lies that assure us that the government is not reading our mail and
monitoring all our phone calls and Internet activity. It is the lies that lure
the nation into wars.

The lies
pouring out of the White House and repeated in the nation’s mainstream media
have achieved a mass that the President has called “phony scandals” and they
include the attack in Benghazi, the role of the National Security Agency, the
actions taken by the Internal Revenue Service against Tea Party and other
conservative groups, and the greatest fountain of lies, the Environmental
Protection Agency.

In page
after relentless page, McFadden cites the facts that disprove the lies about
the connections between smoking and health. Yes, some smokers do develop lung
disease, but many people who do not smoke also fall victim. No, there is no
epidemic of heart attacks among smokers. The alleged links between “secondary”
smoke and health are non-existent. Many of the diseases cited have a genetic
component in which even people who do not smoke fall victim.

The war on
smokers depends on the same general ignorance of science that other comparable
campaigns use. They cite “amounts” of “toxic” substances, so let me end with a
short lesson in reality:

1
milligram = 1,000 micrograms

1
milligram = 1,000,000 nanograms

1
milligram = 1,000,000,000 picograms

1
milligram = 1,000,000,000,000 femtograms

The same
hucksters and frauds that tell you that 0.039% by volume of the carbon dioxide
in the Earth’s atmosphere poses a huge threat to all life and those claiming
that the presence of arsenic in tobacco smoke is a health threat are dependent
on public ignorance. What you are not told is that there is arsenic in potatoes
and in eggplants. What they are not telling you is that the earth’s active
volcanoes are natural sources of carbon dioxide, along with others, including
humans that exhale it.

The
anti-smoking campaign is about controlling people and, as far as Big Pharma is
concerned, making a ton of money selling nicotine patches and gum. The
“scientists” in universities will make their money generating false studies.

It’s a scam. It’s a fraud. It has falsely stigmatized everyone who wants to
light up and relax.

The DC shooter had two gun arrests,
including one where he fired a bullet into his neighbor’s apartment and didn’t
even bother to check on her. He suffered from delusional paranoia, heard
voices, and had a security clearance and a concealed carry license. And the
Navy let him slip through security yesterday carrying a rifle.

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. law enforcement
officials are telling The Associated Press that the Navy contractor identified
as the gunman in the mass shootings at the Washington Navy Yard had been
suffering a host of serious mental issues, including paranoia and a sleep
disorder. He also had been hearing voices in his head, the officials said.
Aaron Alexis, 34, had been treated since August by the Veterans
Administration for his mental problems, the officials said. They spoke on
condition of anonymity because the criminal investigation in the case was
continuing. The Navy had not declared him mentally unfit, which would have
rescinded a security clearance.”

A gun in your
hand is still the best protection against such a random killer or against
anyone threatening your life or the lives of others.

On November 11,
2009, in the week following the killings at Fort Hood—still labeled workplace
violence, not a terrorist attack—a Washington Times editorial noted that “Among
President Clinton’s first acts upon taking office in 1993 was to disarm U.S.
soldiers on military bases. In March 1993, the Army imposed regulations
military personnel from carrying their personal firearms and making it almost
impossible for commanders to issue firearms to soldiers in the U.S. for
personal protection.”

It makes you
wonder why we refer to our military as “armed forces.”

Thanks to the
usual delusionary liberal claptrap cited to oppose gun ownership, military
bases, schools, malls, and even movie theatres remain places where few, unless
they live in a state that permits concealed carry, can shoot back when under
attack.

On Tuesday,
September 17, the nation celebrated Constitution Day, the ratification 226
years ago of the Constitution. When sent to state legislatures many demanded
that a Bill of Rights be included and it is significant that the Second
Amendment right to own and bear arms guarantees the rights enumerated in the
First Amendment.

As Thomas
Jefferson noted, “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The
strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is,
as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” That
was never more true than today!

Michael Savage,
the radio talk show personality, is fond of saying that liberalism is a mental
disorder, but there is ample proof, given the irrational way they keep
demanding more laws to control guns, limit gun ownership, and create other
obstacles to a populace that clearly demands to retain the rights spelled out
in the Second Amendment.

Before the
bodies of Alexis’s victims had been counted and removed, Sen. Dianne Feinstein,
a California Democrat and longtime gun control advocate was denouncing “the
litany of massacres” over the past few years, asking “When will enough be
enough?” but not answering why Monday’s killings and those at the Newtown,
Connecticut school, earlier at Columbine high school, or the movie house
killings in a Denver suburb last year all involved perpetrators who were found
to have been mentally deranged. Sen. Feinstein ignores this fact.

Millions of
Americans own guns, mostly for personal protection as opposed to hunting. There
are 13.7 million hunters in the United States over age 16 according to the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service. As CNS News reported in February, “That means
hunters constitute only 15.9 to 18.1 percent of the estimated 70-80 million gun
owners in the U.S. in 2001—the last year for which statistics are available.”
There are an estimated 300 million firearms in the U.S., about 100 million of
which are handguns.

Liberals and gun
control advocates would have you believe that the nation has been awash in mass
shootings or that our murder rate is soaring. There is no truth in either of
these assertions. Indeed, in states that permit concealed carry of handguns the
murder rate is lower than those that do not. Chicago, famous for its strict gun
laws, has a high rate of murders and is being joined by Newark, NJ and Trenton
in my home state of New Jersey where it is virtually impossible to secure a
concealed carry permit.

While mass
shootings are frightening events, Bloomberg News reported there had been 78
such events over the past thirty years; incidents in which four or more
people were killed at random. There were 547 victims and “over the same three
decades through 2012, that’s less than a tenth of one percent of the
559,347 people the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates were murdered over
that same time period.” According to the World Health Organization,
statistically America ranks among nations with the very lowest murder rates per
100,000, many of which have total gun bans.

A May 7, 2013
article in the Los Angeles Times, reported that “Gun crime has plunged in the
United States since its peak in the middle of the 1990s, including gun
killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes, two new studies of government
data show. Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half
believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew
Research Center.”

Americans are
constantly being harangued over the issue of gun ownership. That issue was
settled 226 years ago when our Constitution was enacted.

Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Among the
targets to disable an enemy’s ability to wage war is their energy
infrastructure. The destruction of the utilities that provide electricity or
its ability to refine oil is critical to crippling a nation’s ability to
function, based on the universal use of hydrocarbons such as coal, natural gas,
and oil.

If an
enemy was doing this to America we would go to war against it, but this is
being done and the enemy is the government on which we depend to ensure the
nation has the energy it needs to function and grow. Leading the war on America
has been the Environmental Protection Agency, but it is joined by the
Department of Energy, the Department of the Interior, and other agencies.

The
Institute for Energy Research has estimated that the much of the government’s
oil and gas that is technically recoverable is worth $128 trillion, about eight
times our national debt. Our coal resources in the lower 48 states are
estimated to be worth $22.5 trillion.

On
September 10, The Wall Street Journal reported that “The Obama administration
plans to block the construction of new coal-fired power plants unless they are
built with novel and expensive technology to capture greenhouse-gas emissions,
according to people familiar with a draft proposal.”The U.S. has more than 27% of the world’s
known coal reserves.

Greenhouse
gas emissions are primarily carbon dioxide (CO2), a gas vital to all life on
Earth, the “food” that vegetation depends upon. It plays no role whatever in a
“global warming” that is not occurring. It is emitted by the Earth’s many
active volcanoes and hot springs. It is exhaled by humans and land animals. It
is the product of the combustion of hydrocarbons. As it increased in the
atmosphere, the Earth has entered a cooling—not a warming—spell since the late
1990s. Its atmospheric concentration is a very tiny 0.039 percent by volume.

It is, however, the justification on which
much of the EPA’s enforcement activities are based. “The only way coal plants
could comply is to capture carbon dioxide emissions and stick them
underground—a costly process that hasn’t been demonstrated at commercial scale
before.”

The idea
of “capturing” CO2 and holding it underground is about as idiotic as it gets.
More CO2 means more abundant crops to feed humans, livestock, and wildlife. It
means healthier forests and jungles. Yet this is what would be required if the
EPA gets its way. And even if it were possible, it would drive up the cost of
electricity to consumers.

If
implemented the proposal would guarantee one thing; fewer coal-fired plants
and, as a result, less production of electricity. In 2012, the American Energy Institute warned that “coal’s share
of U.S. electricity is expected to fall to below 40 percent this year from 42
percent last year and produce the lowest share since data was collected in
1949. Just five or six years ago, its share of electricity generation was 50
percent.”

The
EPA isn’t content stopping the construction of coal-fired plants. In April 2013
a decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the EPA’s veto of the
Arch Coal Spruce Mine in West Virginia. The decision pushed aside the Army
Corps that normally conducts the environmental reviews and which granted
approval to the mine in 2007.

The
EPA ordered the Corps to withdraw the permit. This transfer of power to the EPA
imperils all future coal mining projects. A Wall Street Journal article about
the EPA’s project veto noted that “A recent study by Berkeley Professor David
Sunding estimates that some $220 billion of annual investment depends on these
permits; the fact of an EPA veto will deter new investment." EPA warnings have
caused a British mining giant, Anglo-American, to walk away from a proposed
Alaskan “Pebble” mine—potentially the largest coal and copper project in North
America.

It
is not just coal whose use is targeted by the EPA, fracking technology has
unleashed a boom in natural gas, but the Obama administration has nominated an
enemy of natural gas to chair the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).
Ron Binz regards it as a “dead end” because he too is a believer in carbon
capture and storage. His answer to a non-existent global warming is “renewable”
energy sources such as solar and wind. Solar currently provides 0.01% of the
electricity fed to the grid and wind provides just 2%. FERC oversees much of
the gas business and could effectively deter the growth of this industry with
all of its attendant benefits from jobs to the reduction in the cost of electricity.

A
recent report by the Republican members of the Senate Environment and Public
Works Committee exposes the way the EPA has “pursued a path of obfuscation,
operating in the shadows, and out of the sunlight.” The report noted how the
former administration established an alias identify in order to discuss agency
business without having to report on it. The report provides a lengthy
description of violations of the Freedom of Information Act and other federal
laws and regulations intended to encourage transparency in government.

All
of this is going on while the nation languishes in the long recovery from the
2008 financial crisis, while creating jobs is vital to that recovery, and while
it continues its long history of resisting the provision of energy in any form
to Americans.

It
is a war being waged on Americans, most of whom are unaware of it, but are
being victimized by it.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.